A Radical Reset

The Moral Bankruptcy of Democracy

• Herby • Season 1 • Episode 21

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Staring down the barrel of a $38 trillion national debt, America faces an existential crisis that everyone sees but no one addresses. This episode challenges the sacred cow of democracy itself, arguing that mob rule may be the most immoral form of government precisely because it allows the majority to vote themselves benefits they don't pay for.

Our host takes us on a journey through historical warnings, from Alexis de Tocqueville's prescient observations about democracy's self-destructive tendencies to the folly of Woodrow Wilson's interventionism that sparked catastrophes throughout the 20th century. The uncomfortable truth emerges: when 80% of citizens receive more from government than they contribute, the mathematical certainty of economic collapse looms, yet remains willfully ignored by voters and politicians alike.

As traditional moral frameworks like organized religion lose influence in our science-driven world, we've lost the guardrails that once guided societal decisions. The resulting tribalization fractures rational discourse just when we need it most. But there's a potential solution in what the host calls "anti-politism" – a republic by meritorious lottery that removes ambition from governance while maintaining an achievement-based elite open to anyone willing to work hard.

The podcast presents a challenging but thought-provoking alternative to our current system before economic reality forces change through chaos. When the inevitable crisis arrives, will we be prepared with better options than the charismatic demagogues history teaches us to expect? This conversation couldn't be more timely as we face mounting debt and political polarization that threatens the very foundations of American governance.

Ready to explore alternatives to our failing system? Listen now and consider whether removing ambition from politics might be our last, best hope.

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Herby:

Good morning everybody, and a happy Memorial Day, monday, may the 26th 2025, to you. This is your host, herbie of the Spiritual Agnostic Podcast, and today I want to talk to you about an important subject. But before I get there, I want to pay honor to my fallen brothers in arms. I'm a veteran, not a war veteran, although I am Vietnam era. So Vietnam era means I served between the beginning of the Vietnam War and the official end, which was in 1979. Although, as far as we were concerned, it was sooner than that. I just happened to or 1975, I should say not 1979. What was I saying? 1975.

Herby:

The Vietnam War officially ended on May, the 31st of 1975, insofar as our government was concerned officially, as represented by the ability to wear a wartime service ribbon that the military gives out, I won't go into it. I have the right to wear it because I enlisted prior to the end of the Vietnam War, but I never set foot in Vietnam, so I never called myself a Vietnam veteran. I never even called myself a Vietnam era veteran. I only bring it up because one of the most disgusting things to me are people who pretend to be war vets. You know, vietnam vets, gulf War vets, whatever it is and they're not. They're just, you know, stealing valor, like Tim Walz did, for example, in the last Vietnam, was different. The same story in the last election. Again, I don't care who you voted for, I'm just pointing out that Waltz lied about his service. I don't do that. I'm a veteran, but not a war veteran. I was nowhere near shooting. I was a Russian linguist and, as I used to tell my family, if I'm near shooting, we're all in big trouble when you're a Russian linguist during that period of time, during the Cold War. But you get it Today. I want to talk to you, and so anyway, before I go on, then, I want to just pay honor to the fallen heroes that have fought in our wars. But so many of our wars were completely unnecessary, and that in no way diminishes the valor of the soldiers who went to war because they weren't involved in policymaking. They were called upon by their country to, in their mind, defend it and they did exactly what they were asked to do, and they paid with their lives, and they deserve honor, regardless of the value of the underlying policy. Having said that, so many of our wars were wrong.

Herby:

You know, one of the revisionist history is a fun game to play. And when I say it's a fun game to play, I mean it's fun to pretend. What if this had been different and that had been different? You know what would have happened historically? And of course, we'll never know. It's just a mental exercise. But one of my current favorite games I play is what if Donald Trump had been Woodrow Wilson? Donald Trump had been Woodrow Wilson, okay, what if we had had a non-interventionist president at the beginning of America's greatest period of industrial growth and might? What would the 20th century have looked like?

Herby:

And I make the case that, while there were vile and evil, horrible characters, including potentially the most vile in history, adolf Hitler, which, as a Jew, from my point of view, he is the worst man in history, but if we're going by sheer scale of death, he's only in the middle of the pack. Mao Zedong is the, I believe, the all-time worst mass murderer in history. But would any of that have ever happened had Woodrow Wilson not been president? What instead of Woodrow Wilson, who was the worst kind of fake intellectual? Woodrow Wilson thought he was smart when he really wasn't collected degrees and degrees. My friends and I want to preface I have enormous respect for those of you out there with MBAs and PhDs and multiple degrees and lots of degrees are relevant and important, and I don't make general statements about this, but so often we confuse degrees for expertise, and it's two different things. An expert is someone who really knows what they're talking about. A person with a lot of degrees is somebody who knows how to spit back the answers already given to them by professors in such a way as to please them so that they can get the degree. They're good regurgitators of somebody else's research.

Herby:

Okay, even you know, I used to date a girl years ago, and this is before you know. Everything got digitalized and electronic and they used to physically file all the papers written by professors. So this was at the University of Arizona, which is just a middling state school. I mean, it's a nice school, but it's not Harvard by any. Well, let me take that back. In my view, it's better than Harvard at this point, but I digress. Anyway, but you know what I mean. It's just an average state school. It's no better than the University of Missouri or the University of Maine or the University of Washington or anything. It's just a good state school.

Herby:

Anyway, I dated this girl whose job it was was to keep order to all the theses, theses. Is it theses or theses? I have to think it's theses because that's too much like feces, but you know anyway. So there were just, there were buildings, buildings full of these, of these book papers that nobody read, is the point I'm saying. They were quote-unquote, published and then relegated to a corner of a room where nobody's ever going to read them again, except to do the most obscure kind of research for their own obscure papers that nobody's going to read. And that's the kind of stuff that gets cut constantly. Not that good research doesn't come from it, but anyway, the point is these people all basically smell each other's farts and tell each other that they smell like roses, when there's nothing that really makes them an expert other than they have a lot of initials, and of course, we are in many ways caught in the trap of expertise of an educated elite versus a practical elite.

Herby:

And so today, what I wanted to talk about, that's going to be my transition into what I wanted to talk about, and I'm going to. Oh, by the way, let me just finish the thought I know I was digressing Finishing the thought had we had, instead of Woodrow Wilson, if we had had a president that said it's nobody's business, we would have never entered on anybody's side in World War I. Woodrow Wilson was a snake. I mean really a Ku Klux Klan promoter, not just a member an ugly racist. Father was a Confederate maniac activist general I think he was or someone high up in the Confederacy a real piece of slime. When he came in on the side of France and England in World War I, which was a battle between empires and had nothing to do with us at all. We had no American interest in it at all, but he made sure that we got tangled up in it through a number of machinations.

Herby:

Next thing we know we're putting our enormous industrial might and our finger on the scale in favor of Britain and France, thereby defeating Germany, causing Hitler, causing world communism. I could go into the case of it. It's a longer discussion that I want to spend today. But had we not put our finger on the scale so often in the 20th century, hundreds of millions of people would be alive. Today there would be no Stalin, no Mao, no Pol Pot, no world communism, no Soviet Union to begin with, no Nazi Germany, no World War II. You know, not to say there wouldn't be problems, not to say there wouldn't be an imperial Japan, not to say that other things wouldn't have happened that had nothing to do with Hitler. The marriage between Hitler and Japan were two different things. That would have happened anyway.

Herby:

But regardless, hundreds of millions of people would not have ended up dead if not for Woodrow Wilson, the biggest slimeball, in my opinion, in modern history, a really, truly evil man from top to bottom. I mean, you want to talk about hiding things. The guy had a tendency towards having strokes the last six months of his presidency. He was a vegetable. No one told anybody else. And we had our first female president, his second wife, edith Wilson, who was running the country secretly in a truly disgusting display, which is why it's so important Slight more digression before I get onto the subject today why it's so important that we uncover what went on during the Biden administration, a coverup of Wilsonian proportions that is clearly full of illegality, starting with parting themselves from their own illegalities.

Herby:

And we're going to find out who used the auto pen and whether it's going to be legitimate. We'll see. We will see. There's a lot of time to come and wisdom is called upon, and wisdom is complicated and wisdom is gray, it's not black, it's not white, it's gray. So we'll see. We'll let time develop.

Herby:

I'm not going to continue to comment on that today. So today I'm going to talk about, I'm going to paraphrase what Bill Clinton said when Bill Clinton ran for president way back in the early 90s for the first time I think it was James Carville I might be wrong, but I think it was James Carville who put a sign up in their campaign war room, so to speak that said, basically, it's the economy stupid war room, so to speak. That said, basically, it's the economy stupid. Well, it's not the economy. Today we are facing the most obvious existential crisis that we have ever faced as a country and as a planet. The whole world is staring into both barrels of an existential crisis. Everybody sees it, everybody talks about it. Nobody does anything about it. It's the most unbelievable willful case of public denial in history. Okay, well, denial is the wrong word.

Herby:

I'm talking about, of course, the debt that is smothering us, and it's all based on fiat currency, money with nothing behind it, money that has no value but the promise of the government that issues it paper and ink. Now, in modern terms, we'll call it digital. It's ones and zeros. I don't even know how it all works anymore, but the bottom line is this we owe a tremendous amount of make-believe money that we spent on products that were real. We've run up unbelievable amounts of debt. This debt is unsustainable by any measure of the imagination, and President Trump, who has an opportunity to remake it, was elected to change everything except spending. As Mitch McConnell once famously said, no one ever lost an election by spending too much.

Herby:

Okay, people talk one thing and do the other. This is how we are willfully blind. All of us know about the $36, $37, $38 trillion debt. All of us know and I'm mushy because the number changes depending on who you listen to, but it's up there. It's more than 100% of our gross domestic product and, historically, any country in history who has had a debt greater than 100% of its GDP has ended up in a hyperinflation, because ultimately, that becomes the only thing left to politicians who don't want to deal with the obvious, which is what we're facing once again. History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does a pretty good reprise of the setup every single time, and we are doing exactly what every other stupid civilization did, which is to ignore the problem because it would mean making hard, draconian cuts in in freebies. This is what. This is what we were warned about by um. Uh oh God. What was his name? Uh, oh God. So the tip of my tongue starts with an N, back in 1815, I'm losing my mind, but anyway it'll come to me in a minute. But we were warned about this from the beginning.

Herby:

The founders set up the country as a republic, not a democracy, on purpose, because and this is the subject line of today's podcast democracy is inherently immoral. Democracy is immoral, democracy, democracy. Protect our democracy, make the world safe for democracy. People need to live under democracy. We've all heard it over and over Democracy, democracy, democracy. Democracy is the worst possible kind of government because it lends itself to mob. Democracy is a fancy Greek derivative word for mob rule the rule of you know. We were taught in school that you know.

Herby:

We have majority rule in the United States, like it's something that's good. That's never what made America special. America was never special because of majority rule. Every country has majority rule, regardless of the form of government, because when the majority of people get tired of whoever's ruling them history teaches us they find a way to get rid of them through a violent overthrow, through a revolution, through an assassination, one way or another, if the majority doesn't approve of who's running the show, it might take a while, it might take a year or two for the whole thing to come together, but whoever that person is, who the majority doesn't approve of or that regime is, will be eliminated.

Herby:

Majority rule is the constant of history, not the exception. It's the rule. We call it different names, but a king is a king because the majority accepts the king and a dictator is a dictator because the majority accepts the dictator. They can only maintain an unpopular dictatorship for a certain amount of time and then, sooner or later, what comes to eat them up either is they're assassinated, removed or they inflate their economies, like what's going on in Venezuela with a popular dictatorship that's soon going to be a very, very unpopular dictatorship, if it isn't already, and it'll be brought down regardless of whether there's a fair and free election or not. But our incessant promoting of democracy is insane. We're promoting the most evil, horrible form of government, because it's mob rule and the mob has no values. The mob has the only thing in common with the that any mob has in common is self-interest. Whatever they perceive, their self-interest at the moment is what causes the mob. So you know, people are involved in the MAGA movement and they love president Trump and they believe in what he's doing and they want him to be a disruptor of everything except the program that they're getting.

Herby:

The simple fact of the matter is that 80% of the population pays no net taxes. The top 20% of wage earners pay 100% of the taxes, and I say that. I know that there are statistics that right away, someone is listening right now saying you're wrong, that it's the top half, and yada, yada, yada. No, when you take the amount of benefit a person is receiving against what they're paying for it, anybody who's getting more than they're paying for is not paying any net taxes. So anyone who is not in the top 20% of wage earners is receiving more, directly or indirectly, things like infrastructure, clean water, yada, yada, yada is receiving directly or indirectly more benefit from the government than they're paying for. That doesn't speak to the efficiency of it at all. I'm just speaking to what they get. And so when 80% of the population, which is the vast majority, when 80% of the wage earners, which is almost twice well, there's maybe anyway, figures lie in life's figures.

Herby:

I was about to go explain statistics, but then I realized I was going to go down a rat hole of mathematics which just bore the crap out of you. But trust me when I tell you this the vast majority of people talk a good game but aren't really serious, and we're all a member of that club. I received social security and it's the worst program of all by far, by far. We could shut down the entire government right now. Today, the whole thing, defense included. Shut it down, zero fire every bureau bureaucrat. Send them all home and we would still be running a trillion dollar deficit every year just because of social security which we're through a a, an arc, an arcane machination of lying and manipulation. We've got the people believing it's some kind of a pension program, when it's just nothing but old age welfare and that's all it's ever been all along. But anyway.

Herby:

So back to why I think democracy is the most evil and immoral form of government is because it's in fact mob rule, and the founders knew this. Okay, and they set up a system of government as a republic, not a democracy. A republic is a fancy name for a rule, the rule of a generally agreed upon elite that the masses agree, that this elite of people that originally owned land, who were male and white in those days. Obviously that had to be gotten rid of, and the male thing, you know, obviously. But they were property owners, they had skin in the game. Therefore they were people that were at the top of the income ladder because they owned land and therefore they had skin in the game. And the thought was, by making a property requirement to vote, you would keep people from voting themselves benefits they don't pay for. But Woodrow Wilson, that same evil motherfucker sorry to use the F word. There it went. I really hate Woodrow Wilson. I think he is uniquely evil in history, not just American history, but history in general. Anyway, to make in general, anyway, to make a long story short, woodrow Wilson got rid of the property requirement, along with so much else.

Herby:

And here we are today at the brink of our own self-destruction because we've allowed the masses to vote and the masses will never vote themselves out of benefits. It's just not the way it works. There is no wisdom when we go to the four pillars of stoicism, courage, justice, wisdom and moderation. There's none of those four things evident in mass psychosis and mass needs. The masses only care when push comes to shove, when the curtain on the voting booth closes, when they're voting from home, in the privacy of their own home, and marking that ballot however, they're going to mark it At the top of it, whether you admit it to yourself or not, for most of us is self-interest.

Herby:

What is this going to do? We talk about sending our people to Washington to do something. Why are they doing anything but balancing the budget and coming home? Why are they doing anything beyond defending the country? The only purpose, the only legitimate purpose of government is to protect us from outside threats that we as a people could not defend ourselves from otherwise. Other than that, the government's only responsibility from a moral point of view and I'll explain that in a minute is to stay out of our way, because the minute you begin telling people that you know better, you cross the line from moral to immoral.

Herby:

You do not know better. You do not know the situation of an individual, you just think you know better. You think you know better because perhaps you're better educated. You think you know better because you've achieved more in your life. You make more money, you've accumulated more assets. It's a natural thing to think that you are smarter or better Use whatever adjective you want If you want to delude yourself that you don't think yourself superior to the guy that lives on the street in some ghetto somewhere. That's fine. You can play whatever mental gymnastics you want to play, but in the end you still believe yourself to be superior. When that translates into telling somebody else how to live their life, okay, you become immoral. You do not live on a pinnacle to tell anybody else how to live their lives. What tells people how to live their lives are institutions that have been established through centuries of human evolution that we are spending a lot of time on today, destroying Institutions like organized religion. That's where the whole title of this podcast comes from. The spiritual agnostic God is dying. God, in many ways, is dead. There's no mystery left. Science has exposed what really makes the sun rise and set, what really caused the moon to be formed and orbit around the earth, what effects it really has on the earth, what moves the tides, where animals come from.

Herby:

What evolution is Evolution? By the way, for those of you who are going to start screaming, it's only a theory. It's accepted theory. The difference between theory and accepted theory is while we're never going to find there is no missing link. That's just a myth out of cartoons. Evolution is a theory that there's no evidence to disprove it. In other words, everything that is discovered on an ongoing basis does nothing more than reinforce the theory. And since there's never been anything contradictorily found we haven't found dated bones that puts dinosaurs together with cavemen. I know that's simplistic, guys, but again, let's not dwell on details here. You get the point of what I'm saying. Nothing refutes it. Therefore, evolution is accepted theory. Therefore, it's probably a fact. It's not to say we won't discover the magic wand of God somewhere buried in the cave, but it's unlikely. It's all likely evolution and I don't mean to make fun of God there, because I enormously I should have named the podcast the Envious Spiritual Agnostic because I envy what people with religion have.

Herby:

But today to have religion, to believe in it, you have to have blind faith. You have to believe in faith today, faith. In the old days, having faith in God was not very difficult because without science, you needed an explanation for all the natural phenomena, good and bad, that happened around you. Now that we understand what creates everything, from evolution to thunderstorms and everything in between, and why a hurricane happens, why a tornado happens, why an earthquake happens, why bad things happen to good people. We understand this from a scientific point of view. The mystery is gone and when the mystery is gone, god dies. Because in order to have faith in a time without mystery, you have to believe faith is believing in what can't be true. You have to have faith in a time without mystery. You have to believe Faith is believing in what can't be true. You have to have kind of a miraculous mindset. So you know, I'll go into this in future podcasts, deeper on where I think the nature of faith is, but for the time being, my premise and you can accept it or reject it. Obviously you have a free mind, do what you want my premise is religion is dying because the mystery is gone, and then asking people to believe in what cannot be true is a stretch.

Herby:

The reason that, for example I'll use the Catholic Church as an example, because we just elected the new American Pope, pope Leo XIII, who I don't know if he's good or bad and I have no opinion on him one way or the other Seems like a nice enough guy, but the point is that he spent most of his ministry in Peru and the only reason the Catholic Church is alive today is that it's healthy. In countries with large uneducated masses and people that still believe in supernatural things, that could happen. But the more sophisticated the country and the more sophisticated the technology and the more sophisticated the education of the people, the less God is prevalent. So if you go to Scandinavia, people will still go to church, but I don't know that you could ask anybody walking out if they believe in God and get a firm yes, just saying they're doing it for cultural reasons, societal reasons, and then less and less of them. All the time God is dying and dead. You know, I've said before in earlier podcasts and I'll say it again in this one there have been approximately 10,000 gods that humanity has invented over the millennia that we've been around and been civilized, and we're just on the 10,000th roughly 10,000th one, and he too, jehovah, will go by the wayside, like all others, to our great detriment.

Herby:

Religion was the institution. Think of it not as forget, the supernatural. It was an institution that provided the guardrails of how people had to live, so they didn't have to try to figure it out for themselves what was moral and immoral. The institution laid down the guidelines and the path to follow, and it wasn't the difficult path to follow when it was too difficult a path to follow, like in Orthodox Judaism that Jesus came from, he simply and again, I know I'm simplifying it, but Jesus basically simplified Judaism into a form, got rid of all the rules like kosher laws and the strict observance of the Sabbath and so on that makes Judaism difficult, all the ceremony and it basically morphed into a religion that's much easier to follow. And then, when Catholicism became a little too draped down by its own organization and dragged down by the weight of its bureaucracy, that's where Protestantism started to spring up.

Herby:

And then you know and what's springing up now, of course, is atheism, because people just don't believe it anymore. And this is a trend that we cannot stuff the genie of knowledge back in the bottle. When Eve bit the apple metaphorically, that might have been very accurate to what we've done we have bitten the apple of knowledge, we know what's going on and we've killed God as a result, and to all of our loss. And so if we don't replace that with some sort of underlying philosophy and a new way of governing ourselves, back to the point of this podcast, we're all going to end up well, we are very, very close to an existential fancy word for saying the end of our culture as we understand it. We are inches away from it. We're staring into the abyss.

Herby:

Donald Trump is our last hope and he has no intention of really obviously. At least, I've seen lots of hints that he understands the problem, but he also understands that he too is not magical and if he proposed all these cuts he would become as unpopular as he is popular today. So he's staying away from it because, while the joke is he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it I think I'm paraphrasing what he said he wouldn't get away with it if he took away any social security from anybody who thought they deserved it, regardless of how wealthy they are. So that's the point I'm making. So back to the point Democracy is inherently immoral and, yes, let's use the word evil, it's mob rule. A republic is what replaces democracy. But what's going to happen? So after a collapse, I am not optimistic that America is going to pull our fat out of the fire. I'll be honest with you.

Herby:

This podcast is designed to set the stage to begin a movement on anti-politism, the political system that I invented, which is a republic by meritorious lottery, which, if that at least tickles your fancy, you can pick up a copy of A Radical Reset, the book on anti-politicism, the manifesto of it, which is available to you on Amazon in either Kindle paperback or hardcover form by me, herbie K. You can pick it up today and it lays out what a Republic by Meritorious lottery system is. But what it will do is guarantee that the parasites, the people, the parasitic class I won't call them parasites there are probably lots of good people mixed in, but they're a parasitic class. If you're taking more than you're paying and you're indignant about paying more, you are a member of a parasitic class. Okay and so. And the reason nobody wants to pay more in the form of taxes isn't because people, generally speaking, don't want to get what they pay for. It's because they understand that the government wastes most of what it takes.

Herby:

If Doge proves nothing else, doge, which is a failed experiment, is going the way of the Grace Commission, and those of you old enough to remember this, we've been down this road before. Ronald Reagan came to office in 1980, and he appointed this industrialist named Grace to form a commission. Grace was the Musk of his day. They formed this commission. They found that just like Doge, just a slightly different methodology Billions. In those days there were no trillion dollar deficits. The trillion never entered anyone's Our economy. I don't think was a trillion dollars when Reagan was president. Anyway, they formed the committee to get rid of all the government waste. They came up with all these wonderful recommendations, they were backed by all the conservatives and libertarians and blah, blah, blah and it all came to nothing. And that's what's happening with Doge. They found all this waste, but unless the savings is codified and translated to a lot, it means nothing. It's just a lot of mental masturbation. And that's exactly what Doge has accomplished to basically satisfy the libertarian wing of the rational set of people that are involved in the MAGA movement.

Herby:

However, the problem is not the MAGA movement. The problem is not the Democratic or Republican party per se. It's parties that they even exist. There should be no political parties, there should be no representation of special interests, and as far as the money in politics, which is what the ruling class does, is make incredibly immoral things legal, there's an enormous difference between legal and moral, and so what they've done is they've made I'll give you a really good, open example of a typical smoke and mirrors making the immoral legal thing, and that's the limit on the size of campaign contributions, when that was proposed to limit them to $2,000, whatever the small number is per individual. All they did was create an advantage for the incumbent, because what a political party can do is put out its massive fundraising machine to raise all these small donations in various forms and use tricks like political action committees and super PACs to raise money that are quote, unquote, issue campaigns as opposed to candidate campaigns, and make all these ways around the rules legal that are immoral and call it all campaign reform, when all it really is is a guarantee that most of the money flows to the incumbent and the incumbent serves people going to Congress like Joe Biden in their 30s and then stay way past the point of being even sentient.

Herby:

Another Democratic congressman who I don't know anything about him, died this week. He was probably a nice guy. Rest in peace. But listen, you shouldn't be in office long enough that you're dropping dead in office. Unless by accident or some fluky thing, you shouldn't be dying of old age in office. You know Strom Thurmond was in office. I know that's. Unless you're old enough, you don't. That means nothing to you, but here's a guy that served in office until he was covering. He was coloring his hair with Tang breakfast drink. By the end, at least, it seemed like that it was. Just it's grotesque.

Herby:

Okay, and we can avoid all of that through anti-politism. Anti-politism is the perfect form of Republic. No, let me rephrase that. It's not perfect. Nothing perfect form of republic. No, let me rephrase that it's not perfect. Nothing's perfect that even beings do. It's as close to perfect as we could get, and we're going to need what comes next, because what's going to come after the crash here, I'm going to tell you what the future brings, and I know it as sure as God made little green apples.

Herby:

What I don't know is the day. It's coming, and I understand that there are a lot of doom and gloomers that have been predicting this for a long, long time, and the way you can lie to yourself is saying to yourself some form of well, it's never come true, it's just blah, blah, blah. They're always saying that it won't happen. Yada, yada, yada. They know what to do, like there's a mystical force that won't allow the horrible things to happen. You're counting on the very people that you're envious of or can't stand, to save the day, because they will want to preserve the system that you pretend like you hate but is really feeding you more than you're paying for. And and you know it's, it's a. We lie to ourselves while we lie to each other, while we lie in public, and we call it all kinds of names, but it's just self-deception. Okay, and and um, uh, you know, I'm still trying to remember the name of that Frenchman. It's driving me crazy. Anyway, so I have such an active mind. You know, I don't know how other people's minds work, because I don't have other people's minds Mine is always shooting all over the place, kind of like if you could see a pinball machine and I know that dates me a lot With the ball, you know, you fire it up and it pings around those of you who've seen movies about it, that's my mind. It's pinging off of things all the time. And anyway, de Tocqueville Now that makes me feel better.

Herby:

Alexis de Tocqueville, in 1815, wrote a book called Democracy in America and warned us of exactly what's happening now. And he saw that, you know, 300 years ago, essentially. And so you know, or two, what? No, I'm sorry, 210 years ago. And was it? Let's see 1850? Yeah, right, is that 210? Right, 19, 20, almost 300. Anyway, math obviously is not my strong suit, but he saw it coming because this is what always happens in mob rule.

Herby:

Okay, we're at mob rule, and what anti-politism is is it breaks mob rule but it opened. But what makes it perfect is it leaves the door open so that everybody who is willing to make an effort can be part of the elite. It's an elite of achievement as opposed to an elite of anything else. It's not at least elite of gender or race or even education. It's an elite of achievement. It uses only one measure to decide who is eligible to be selected in the lottery to serve us for a single term. Everyone in antipolitism is a one and done.

Herby:

And, by the way, it's a federal program. If states want to adopt it, that's fine. States are not nearly as dangerous as the federal government because states don't print money. The minute you allow somebody to print money, you're telling them to steal and print money in the garage. It's just a recipe for massive fraud and we are in a massively fraudulent government. We think we're in a democracy when in fact we live in a kleptocracy. A bunch of kleptomaniacs stealing and making it look legal, and what's going to happen is a charismatic leader will emerge from the rubble of the destruction that's coming. There will be a number of people that will hold them out as pull themselves out as having the answer, and it'll be a simple answer and it'll be presented by somebody who knows how to give a speech. And if it sounds like I'm talking about Hitler, I am, but I'm also talking about what will be the American version of it when we go down the drain. There will be American Hitlers Now, not in the sense that they necessarily want to commit genocide, but evil takes many, many forms and it always comes at you smiling, and evil always looks good.

Herby:

That's why it happens. Evil isn't like in the movies or in cartoons, you know, where there are two-dimensional characters that always think evil and always act evil and always do evil things and are just psychopathic about everything and have no humanity. But the fact of the matter is evil, people are always smiling. If you really look at Hitler, for example, to use him as the paragon of evil in the last century or so, maybe historically forever, and again to use him as the paragon of evil in the last century or so, maybe historically forever Again, that's another discussion, but certainly he's in the pantheon of evildoers. He was very sweet with children. He smiled all the time. He had a warm and inviting smile. When he was in public he was always smiling. Women loved him. Children loved him. He had like a lot of psychopaths. I don't know why this is, but he had an incredible connection with dogs and animals. He was a very human monster and that is what's going to emerge in the United States will be human forms of monsters. They won't look like monsters, they'll look like somebody.

Herby:

Trump is not it. I know some of you right now the trump, the range you're going, it's trump. It's trump. It's not trump. Trump is our last chance to save the day.

Herby:

Okay, under the old system, he's going to fail. I mean, you know he's well intended, but he's going to fail. He's gonna. He's accomplishing a lot of good things, infrastructure wise, but in the end he will fail because he's not dealing with this oncoming disaster. That it's the most predictable disaster ever, but it's also just as predictable that the entire population is looking away from it.

Herby:

And I'm not trying to persuade you to look at it. I know that you're not and I'm not you as an individual, as a mass, because I don't expect superhuman morality to emerge from a mass. That's just not going to happen. Instead, when the shit hits the fan, we're going to need an alternative that isn't just another form of suppression of the masses and kleptocracy, which is what will emerge, probably with some violence involved.

Herby:

Okay, especially as we have managed to completely tribalize our country with all this racial and sexual identity nonsense. This is all the tribalization that's. The worst possible thing that could happen is tribalization, because it fractionalizes rationality. And so here we are, staring into the abyss, and the only way out, truthfully, if we want to have a chance, if humanity and this is going to be really you're going to think I'm a far out guy, but you know I'm not going to pivot just for a moment to the Fermi paradox, which is put forward by Fermi, who was an Italian physicist, enrico Fermi, who wondered where are they all? I mean, we're listening to the heavens, we've got our super antennas and telescopes and listening devices and nothing. No radio waves, nothing.

Herby:

There's no lights flashing, no signs of intelligence, and I should rephrase that, not so much intelligent but sentient life. You know, I just want to digress again from my digression. My dog, pepper, is intelligent, but she's not sentient. In other words, she has no awareness of her own mortality, and there's an enormous difference. It's the awareness of mortality that drives innovation. Okay, but that's not going to happen on a planet where there's only intelligent life. Is life smart enough to keep itself from going extinct? Whales are intelligent, dolphins are intelligent, dogs are intelligent, cats are intelligent, birds are intelligent, fish are intelligent. They have the intelligence to survive. They're not single-celled organisms without a brain. They have functioning brains and they know how to survive. That's intelligence.

Herby:

However sentience, we might be the only ones, and it might be because they come to Fermi, or I don't know if it was Fermi who postulated this, but there's a theory that says we haven't found them because there's a great barrier. There's something that destroys all sentient civilizations when they reach that point and we might be there now with AI civilizations when they reach that point, and we might be there now with AI because we, as biological beings, cannot possibly evolve fast enough to keep up with the machines that we have created, that self-evolve at speeds that are by scales of quadrillions faster than we can. And will we be able to control this and will it bring our end? It'll be interesting to see. But the thing that could light.

Herby:

The fire of our own self-destruction under AI isn't AI itself, but the government and the regulation of the AI and the elites that get in control of parts of it and will lead to our own self-destruction through their own self-interest and self-dealing, and the only way we're going to break that. The commonality of all elites in all countries, whether they are democracies or dictatorships, is that the people at the top sought leadership and so by that, in other words, they wanted to be the dictator or they wanted to be the president of megalomania in many cases, and lends itself to sociopathy, because the reason there's so few good people in government in any country is because most good people wouldn't want to expose themselves or their families to the public, beating that a campaign or public life involves, and so they just and they have other priorities and their families come first and their communities come first, and you know public approbation is not important to them, so they don't run in the first place. Yet they're exactly the right people who should be in charge, because they have no ulterior motive to collect power unto themselves. And that's what antipolitism does. It creates an elite of merit and achievement, not an elite of education or desire or drive or ambition, ambition is eliminated from the equation in antipolitism and once you take that out, we have it's our only chance. Friends.

Herby:

Antipolitism, whether you believe it or not, in this little lonely podcast in a tiny little corner of the internet, just starting out in the nick of time, is telling you. I'm telling you straight up, not telling you. I'm telling you straight out, not me personally. I don't think I invented anti-politism. I think I discovered it. I think it was just in plain sight. They're waiting to be discovered. It is a republic by a meritocracy of achievement, selected by lottery, not by the pursuit of office.

Herby:

Think about that generically and then pick up a copy of the book A Radical Reset A Radical Reset on Amazon by me, herbie K. Pick up your copy, kindle, paperback or hardcover, give it a read and tell me what you think. By the way, I don't hold myself out to be a great writer and I also don't hold that everything I wrote in that book has to be sacred like it's a Bible. It'll start a debate and there are people smarter than I am and more experienced than I am that might be able to help polish it up and make it better than what I invented. I'm opening up the floor to discussion, but fundamentally, I'm getting the ambition out of politics and providing a way out of this mess to where we would all be If we had an anti-political Congress now. This will be my closing thought for the podcast.

Herby:

If we had an anti-political Congress now this will be my closing thought for the podcast. If we had an anti-political Congress and an anti-political president and vice president and no political parties whatsoever and government was run as anti-politism, we would not be in the. We would simply not be staring into the abyss that we are, and we would solve the problem if we were so. But it's not going to happen. I'll tell you now. I'll give you a little hint.

Herby:

I'm thinking about running for office next year. I think I'm going to run for Congress in my congressional district and I'm going to run as a libertarian, which means I'm probably going to lose. Unless the collapse comes between now and November of next year. The chances of me winning as a libertarian in a congressional district is very, very long. No one's ever done it yet. I don't think I'll be the first Now.

Herby:

Having said that, why then would I run? And the answer is I'm trying to start a movement, and that means publicity. So I'm going to run for Congress and count on the fact that I, you know forgive the immodesty, but this is no time to pretend that we're not good at what we are when we're staring down both barrels of a loaded shotgun aimed right in the middle of our forehead, metaphorically speaking. I'll tell you right now I'm a great public speaker and I'm going to count on that charismatic ability to speak in order to get more votes than a libertarian. Here's my plan I'm going to run for Congress next year. I'm going to lose, but instead of the usual less than 1% or 1% or 2% that libertarians automatically get, because there's that many libertarians in any given congressional district I'm going to make my goal to get 10% or more. If I can get 10% or more of the vote, when the final vote comes in November, it'll be national news. I'll have gotten more votes than any libertarian has ever gotten and I'll become a curiosity. And then I'll get interviewed and hopefully from that I'll springboard and start a national discussion on anti-politism as a movement.

Herby:

Now, as a movement, I don't intend to ever run for office again, and I use the word intend intentionally, because you never know what the future brings and what might be a wise course of action at some point down the road, but, as of today, my intention is being a 68 year old man is the start of movement. Bring people into it who are smarter than I and grow it so that, when the end comes whether it's during my lifetime or after there is something to catch the mess and convert and save the good parts of our republic, which is that. What made us special before we completely fucked it up for lack of a better word is we didn't protect the rights of the majority. In America, we protect the rights of the individual, and we've completely lost that in the tribalization and collectivization that has taken place simultaneously in this kleptocracy that we've created, and the only way out is anti-politism and we need, since religion is dying and we've lost our moral bearing.

Herby:

This is going to be our moral compass. This is going to be a challenge, my friends. So I invite all of you who are still religious and still believe in decency and values to join with me and other people who are agnostic but respect that we have lost what made religion special in our culture and lost the track to run on and lost our sense of cultural decency and lost the boundaries that kept it all together and the underpinning and foundational beliefs that kept us surviving, regardless of what happens in the future. All right, I could keep going. I obviously am in love with my own voice, so I'm going to stop right there before this runs on forever. Thank you so much for joining me. It has been an absolute pleasure, as always, sharing with you.

Herby:

Again, don't forget to pick up a copy of a radical reset at Amazon Kindle paperback or hardcover. A radical reset by me, herbie K. Feel free to comment, send me little messages. There'll be a link wherever you're streaming this to get to my Buzzsprout website where you can talk to me directly if you choose. Also, support the show. There's a way to support the show there as well. I would really appreciate that. God knows I'm not doing this trying to get rich or to achieve power, but to start a movement, and that takes money, and anything you can contribute would be very, very appreciated. What else is there for me to share with you today, I think? Oh, don't forget to tell your friends about the podcast. Share it around, yada, yada, yada. You know the drill. Thank you so very, very much. Have a wonderful Memorial Day. I'll talk to you this coming Wednesday and until then, take care. This is Uncle Herbie saying God bless you and bye, bye.